Following pilot project, Ont. township votes to implement four-day week

By Ben Cousins, CTVNews.ca Writer

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    TORONTO, Ontario (CTV Network) — An Ontario township council has unanimously voted to bring in a four-day workweek for its employees following a successful pilot project.

Council for Zorra Township, a community of 8,138 people between Kitchener and London, Ont., shifted from a traditional workweek to working 10-hour days for four days each week for its 30 full-time employees, and on Wednesday voted to maintain the schedule change on a permanent basis.

“I think it’s quite self-explanatory and I think it’s time to move ahead,” Coun. Ron Forbes said during the meeting. “I haven’t seen any problems with this since we started. Let’s move forward.”

Under the project, some employees worked from Tuesday to Friday, while others worked Monday to Thursday. This had the added benefit of keeping the municipal offices open longer, at no additional cost to residents.

In a survey following the project, 73 per cent of employees wanted to continue with the schedule change, according to research from Western University and York University.

“Those working in the public sector are eager for more flexibility in their working lives as much as those in the private sector,” Zachary Spicer, a professor at York’s School of Public Policy and Administration, said in a news release.

“Zorra has given us a great indication that this flexibility is possible and can be managed well.”

The participants also reported the new schedule offered more flexibility, while some were concerned with the longer working hours and their ability to find child-care arrangements.

Others were worried about office workflow issues and having less direct contact with other employees, but 43 per cent of employees expressed no concerns with the project.

Joseph Lyons, director of Western’s local government program and a political science professor, said township employees were satisfied with their jobs before the pilot, and that this project may not have been so successful if they had not been.

“A potential lesson here is that organizations with good culture and strong leadership are more likely to be innovative,” he said.

“If Zorra were a bad place to work to start with, leadership would have been busy dealing with more managerial issues and wouldn’t have had the support or confidence to try out something so ambitious.”

There are some limitations to the research, however, asthe pilot project was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic and the township onlyhas 30 full-time employees.

“With a pool of respondents that small, results are susceptible to small variations in responses,” Spicer said.

OTHER COUNTRIES ARE FINDING SUCCESS WITH THE SHORTENED WEEK Several other countries have also found success with a four-day workweek.

In Iceland, Reykjavik City Council and the Icelandic government launched a similar program in 2015 and found that employee stress went down, while productivity either stayed the same or rose.

There is also a bill going through U.S. Congress, that if passed would require employers to offer overtime pay for anyone working more than 32 hours per week.

In 2019, Microsoft began a four-day workweek program for their offices in Japan. While office time plummeted, productivity jumped 40 per cent.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern suggested in May 2020 that a shift to a four-day workweek could be part of the country’s solution to restart the economy following the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There’s lots of things we’ve learnt about COVID and just that flexibility of people working from home, the productivity that can be driven out of that,” she said.

A few months after Ardern’s suggestion, Unilever, the distributor of Lipton’s tea, Dove soap and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, announced it was bringing in a four-day week for its employees in New Zealand.

In Canada, the Nova Scotia municipality of Guysborough is also testing the idea, while several private companies have also begun shortening the week.

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